A sputtering system is widely used in the semiconductor manufacturing industry for depositing materials on semiconductor wafers. Sputtering is sometimes referred to as physical vapor deposition, or PVD. In a sputtering operation, thin films comprising materials such as Al, Au, Cu, Ta are deposited in a vacuum on silicon wafers or other substrates. To make a stack of thin films of different materials, one common practice is to use multiple single-wafer process chambers wherein each chamber deposits only one material on one substrate at a time. For a tri-layer structure comprising Ti/Cu/Au, three separate single-wafer process chambers are required to sequentially deposit Ti, Cu and Au onto the substrate. The dedication of an individual process chamber to specific material deposition adds equipment costs and processing costs. The limitation of single-wafer transfer between chambers slows down the system throughput.
Various other drawbacks are found in typical sputtering systems. These drawbacks relate to inefficient magnetron operation, non-uniform coverage, poor temperature control of the wafers, contamination of the wafers and other components, and non-uniform target erosion, among other things.